CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidarraylistsharedpreferences
Faz
Faz

Reputation: 354

store arraylist sharedpreferences android

Is it a good idea to store a list of String with too many items in Sharedpreferences? Does it hurt app performance?

I'm doing this to store: 

public boolean saveArray(List<String> contacts) {
    SharedPreferences sp = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(_context);
    SharedPreferences.Editor editor = sp.edit();
    editor.putInt("Status_size", contacts.size());
    for (int i = 0; i < contacts.size(); i++) {
        editor.remove("Status_" + i);
        editor.putString("Status_" + i, contacts.get(i));
    }
    return editor.commit();
}

And to read: 

public void loadArray(Context context) {
    SharedPreferences sharedPreferences = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(context);
    _validContactsPhones.clear();
    int size = sharedPreferences.getInt("Status_size", 0);
    for (int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
        _validContactsPhones.add(sharedPreferences.getString("Status_" + i, null));
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

Views: 120

Answers (1)

Reaz Murshed
Reaz Murshed

Reputation: 24241

No, its not a good idea to store a huge list of String like contacts in SharedPreference.

There's no specific limit of size for the stored SharedPreference in your application as its stored in the /data/data/[package name]/shared_prefs/[app name].xml. Since SharedPreferences are stored in an XML file it lacks the strong transaction support of SQLite. Hence I would recommend to store this kind of data in a SQLite database.

Another thing which needs to keep in mind that, the lowest size limit that I am aware of will be your amount of free heap space, as SharedPreferences reads that entire XML file's contents into memory.

The answer is mostly copied from here.

Upvotes: 1

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